Online Marketing Tactics That Can Work For SaaS In 2025

Discover the most effective online marketing tactics for SaaS in 2025. Learn how to boost your growth and stay ahead of the competition.

This insightful show explores the most effective online marketing tactics tailored specifically for Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses in 2025. Discover innovative strategies that leverage emerging technologies and consumer trends to enhance your marketing efforts. From personalized content to AI-driven analytics, we cover it all. Don’t miss out on the tactics that can elevate your SaaS business.

With Special Guest Lars Lofgren

This Week’s Show Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Convesio: Convesio

Omnisend: Omnisend

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:14.560] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is an episode. In this show, we’ve got a real expert. He’s helped many medium, large, and small companies and entrepreneurs with online marketing strategies. Came on my radar a couple of months ago and I feasted on his online blog and his latest videos. I thought he would be an excellent guest for the show, and he agreed. And that’s Lyres Lough Green. He’s the Chief Growth Officer at Stone Press. He’s got a load of experience. It should be an exciting show. We will discuss the changing landscape of SEO in online marketing and everything to do with it. It should be a fantastic discussion. So, Laya, would you like to give the tribe a quick 10- or 20-second intro, and then when we go into the meat potatoes of the show, I will ask for a deeper insight into your background?

[00:01:36.680] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, absolutely. It’s great to be here. As far as who I am, I’ve been doing online marketing and growth for my whole career. I originally started straight out of college. I got hired by Heat and Shaw and Neil Patel at Kissmetrics, their original startup, or one of their original startups. That the whole thing imploded, that’s the entire story. But I got a lot of learning opportunities from that, and I’ve worked with many other companies now. I have moved away from my company, Stone Press. We shut all that down. That’s a whole different story.

[00:02:06.680] – Jonathan Denwood

Which we can go into.

[00:02:08.150] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, which I’m happy to go into. And then, right now, I’m doing the fractional VP thing. I’m helping with content strategy, content programs, SEO, and stuff for a few major brands.

[00:02:20.050] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. I’ve got my patient co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:02:28.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

Hey, folks. My name is Kurt, Kurt von I own an agency called Mañana No Mas, and we work directly with WP Tonic and the good folks at Lifter LMS.

[00:02:37.510] – Jonathan Denwood

Like I said, it should be a fantastic discussion. Liza just got tremendous experience, and he’s a really down-to-earth guy. I tried to be. We’ll see. I’ve got the impression you’re pretty… But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great interview, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the interview, I would also like to point out that we have an excellent WordPress professional resource. It’s a list of the best WordPress plugins, technologies, and services that can help you, the agency owner, the freelancer, and the power user. Plus, we got some special great deals from the show’s major sponsors. You can get all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you, WordPress professional or power user, ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get on that page. I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. You should laugh, Liza. That’s not a bad one, Liza. All right, sorry. There we go.

[00:04:02.910] – Jonathan Denwood

So, you gave us a quick intro. Maybe you can provide us with more insight about your journey and how you got into marketing and helping build companies up. How did you get into this world, Lies?

[00:04:22.370] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, that’s probably true. I’ll go into all the details, but I was in college then. This was when blogging, WordPress, and all that stuff were sexy and cool. Well, maybe it never was that sexy, but it was the thing. Wordpress is still sexy. Lies? Yeah, I don’t know. Well, it was like, at least in the online tech world, it was like, oh, I wanted to have a blog.

[00:04:43.950] – Jonathan Denwood

The WordPress world is getting too exciting.

[00:04:48.080] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, maybe. Well, you should have been there in the day. No. But there was a period where anybody that was online and doing online marketing was like, oh, I want to have a blog. There was a lot of people that nobody wants to say that anymore, at least not generally. They all want to be TikTok influencers or something. But back then, everybody wanted to blog. So I started blogging. I was like, this is cool. I like this. I like to write. I like to build websites. This is fantastic. Got into it, started building my own personal blogs and tried to build a blog on foreign policy, international affairs. That’s what I got my degree in. And I was building traffic. I had a whole group of interns working for me, cranking out content. And I wasn’t paying them anything because I’ve convinced the college to give them a college credit for all their work. And it was going along and I realized, wait, my skills that I’m using or that I’ve built building the blog are way more valuable than the actual blog. Why don’t I just go try to sell these skills to other people, especially because this is new?

 

[00:05:54.240] – Lars Lofgren

Building email lists, brand new, building websites, no one has to do it. Wordpress, still very, very new blogger’s a thing at the time. Drupal was still really popular. Drupal websites are everywhere. Yeah, no one misses those days. So I was like, why don’t I go just start freelancing and helping other people build their websites? And I was getting into copywriting and all this stuff. And I was like, I’ll just charge them and I’ll make way more money than I am on this rinky dink little blog that’s paying me 40 cents a month on AdSense revenue. I’ll I’ll make… I close one client and I’ll make more money. I’m a college student, so $100 goes a long way. I went that route and started closing clients and then use that to get my first job with Kismetrix, and the whole thing is The rest is history, basically, right?

 

[00:06:47.810] – Jonathan Denwood

How did you get the gig with Kismetrix? I’m going to say some nice things about you, so you want to write them down because I don’t want to-Well, we have the recording, so I’ll just save that and I’ll lay it every morning before I start my day. Because you’re not too big-headed. A lot of people that are in the marketing for a long time and have a bit of success in that, their heads can grow a bit, shall we put it that way? You seem very down to earth. But you pointed out when we were having our email exchange, when I said you worked with Dropbox and Everno and a lot of other companies, you pointed out that you did a bit of work with them. But it’s still impressive you worked with quite a few big names. How did you build up your reputation? Was it just word of mouth that you weren’t a bullshitter and you got some results?

 

[00:07:43.420] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, I think that helps. Honestly, I think there was two things that really accelerated everything and got on that speed ramp to somewhere. I don’t even know where I’m still going. So the first thing was getting that job at Kissmetrix was a total game changer for my career. It probably cut 10 years off my career right out of the gate for a number of reasons. One, even today, even Kissmetrix is not even a thing anymore. I think technically you can still sign up for it, but the number of people that still know about it, and I can still reference it, even 15 years later, is insane. And that’s because For its era, Kismetrix was a hot startup. It was in that early SaaS cohort. It was doing things innovative. Neil and Heedon were everywhere at the time. They were all over Twitter. They were all over everything. And if you were around in online marketing in that era, you ran into all three of those things, Neil, Heedon, and Kismetrix. And then I’m right in the center of it. So even if the startup doesn’t work out, I never made any money off of Kismetrix, my shares.

 

[00:09:02.120] – Lars Lofgren

I don’t even think I exercised my options. I was like, I know where this is going. I’m not doing this. I’m going to keep hold of that like a couple of thousand dollars or whatever it was. And so I never made any money off it. It was never going to IPO. It never did IPO. But the value that I got off of that early brand was crazy. Like today, if you’re working at, well, if you were one of the first people at OpenAI, like just game over, right? Like your career is set. We’re an early employee at Slack when it was hot. You’re set, right? Even if no one makes any money, if you just have that brand logo from the right time and you’re one of the cool vintage startups of your era, it’s a game changer. So that was the one.

 

[00:09:50.550] – Jonathan Denwood

So what I think you’re saying is the credos of that, even now, when you do outreach or you want to talk to somebody, they’re prepared to have a chat with you.

 

[00:10:01.250] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. And it’s not as like the Kissmetrics brand doesn’t necessarily carry the weight that it used to. There was a period there where I got… I could just say, Hey, I was the head of marketing at Kissmetrics, and that got me into all sorts of crazy doors. I don’t lead with that anymore. Because it has wanged. But that set me up for the next thing in a big way, which set me up for the next thing. And Heet and Shaw, Neil Patel. Neil Patel has got his massive agency. Everybody knows Neil, right? It’s crazy. So I can still do that name drop and be like, Yeah, Neil Patel hired me straight out of college for his first startup, and everyone’s like, Whoa, wow. Okay. So the brand, what I have to focus on to get that big punchy brand social proof, it’s shifted over the years, but it helped. That Kiss Metrix had a lot of juice in it during that era and got me to all sorts of things that now I can lean on front and center.

 

[00:10:56.070] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s great. Over to you, Kurt.

 

[00:10:58.420] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I get to I mentioned the big name everybody seems to get fearful over, and that’s Google. I’m old school, too. I started working in WordPress in 2004, and I can remember working with clients back in the day where it’s like, if you just focus on making some good content, use decent lead-ins, decent titles, and a little social media, people are going to find you. And it’s not like that now. Now, I see beautiful websites to get zero traffic. If we’re going to talk about, or you talked about it before in an interview about how Google basically decimated SEO strategies for a lot of folks, and then you see a lot of people jumping over to Reddit or different forums to try and get some heat or some action on their brands. What are your real thoughts on this game as we move forward?

 

[00:11:56.400] – Jonathan Denwood

I just want to point out the Finns moved a bit, hasn’t it? It’s because they brought out their March update and they seem to have hit, well, various influences that I listened to saying that niche forums have been hit. They’re oscillating a bit. Surprise, surprise, isn’t it, about Google? I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s a very fluent change in landscape, isn’t it?

 

[00:12:24.050] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, I have a few clients right now and I hate telling them how I feel about anything because I know as soon as the update comes out, it’s all going to get rocked. So it’s like, I don’t even want to be optimistic. It’s like, who knows what’s coming around the corner? But yeah, the world has changed. I mean, for almost my entire career, If you built a website and you focused on quality content, and then you did a little bit of link building, you could get somewhere interesting. And not even sketchy. I’m not even talking about the hard core affiliate, like competitive spaces where you have to do a ton of link building or like actual link swaps or crazy link schemes and shit like that. Even just in a natural, organic way, tight content program And focus on different topics and keywords, keep it fairly clean. You don’t have to be perfect, but somewhat clean and focused. And it will pay off. The struggle for SEO for the longest time was like, it always worked But you had to get through this really long… There was always this delay. We had to really go for it for a good three years.

 

[00:13:37.590] – Lars Lofgren

And then things got really interesting, and it more than paid off. I believed users won, Google won, the company won. Everybody was winning. Everybody was benefiting. Content kept getting better. And those days have really changed. That is not true anymore. If I was building out a startup from scratch, And they were asking me, Hey, should we do an ongoing blog program where we’re doing 10, 20, 30 blog posts a month? Maybe we’re doing them in-house, maybe we have a content agency, whatever. And I’m like, I’m not sure that’s a good It’s a good idea, honestly. I might do that if I had my own tech startup or SaaS startup of some kind, but only because I know this stuff, and I know it really well. But I’d also be very hesitant about it from day one. I I really wouldn’t go full bore like I would even a couple of years ago. And today, maybe I think my baseline recommendation without learning anything else about a given new tech startup would be, okay, you’re in a given category in space. There’s probably a few, and by few, I mean a few, maybe informational topics. There’s probably a few bottom of the funnel stuff, the alternatives, the review topics, the versus topics, you versus your competitors.

 

[00:15:02.440] – Lars Lofgren

You’re probably looking at 20, 30 posts total. Go put those on a section of your site, spend a good amount of time on that content. Hopefully, because you’re a startup, it’s so small that the competition in that space is essentially zero. And Google needs more content. And you’re not going to get to the top very quickly, even if you focus a ton on content quality and link building and all that stuff. But maybe you get somewhere in at the bottom of the first page and you get just a few visits coming in that get past all the AIO bullshit. They’re coming through on ChatGPT and you get a few of those extremely high quality visitors because they made it through all the other hurdles, and they’re landing on your site. And even though this blog post gets two visitors a month, they’re still extremely valuable in your space. Like, okay, that’s probably worth it. I’d probably do that out of the gate. But do you want to go in on a full content program? I don’t know. Like not for a new startup? I don’t know. I’d seriously question it. I would hesitate. And I know this stuff, and I love this stuff.

 

[00:16:11.530] – Kurt von Ahnen

It takes so much work and so much time, and most business people downplay it. They don’t recognize what they’re getting into when they try to, Oh, I’m going to take my message online. And then it’s like, Okay, well, you need all this content. As a person that makes websites for clients, our number one battle is, Where’s Where’s your stuff? And they’re, Oh, this website doesn’t have enough pizazz and sizzle. And you’re like, Well, it would have more pizazz and sizz if he gave me some content. But then other people say, You see it all the time in the forums. Someone will write, SEO is dead or there’s another, all these things. And it’s like, well, you can’t just give up. You got to do something to get your brand and your name out there. And unfortunately, a lot of people just seem to think it’s paid ads if they’re not leveraging a A content strategy. Where do you think that really leads? Or I’d love to ask questions about AI searching, too. I’m in the middle of an AI search project that got me baffled and backwards, but that’s probably for another moment.

 

[00:17:16.830] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. As far as the options other than… Well, I don’t think SEO is dead. I will say all of my clients are pretty big. Two of them are very big. And I’m excited I’m excited to work on their stuff. Everything I’m seeing, I see tons of positive signals. I’m like, okay, yeah. If I could keep this team on board for three years, we’re going to do something really cool. All the signals from Google are very, very positive. Now, these are massive brands. It’s like domain authority off the charts. It’s just crazy. But even mid-tier brands, I’m like, Oh, this is going to be hard. We have to show up with our A game across the board, and we are going to fight for every inch, and it’s going to be tough. So if I’m a smaller brand or I’m an affiliate, what I would absolutely try to talk people out of these days, not that it’s impossible, but the margin of error is so thin and small. If someone’s trying to build a media company around SEO entirely, I was. That’s what Stone Press was. We were building sites with our partners. We were building our own stuff.

 

[00:18:27.820] – Lars Lofgren

I loved SEO. My co founder, he’d been in SEO his entire career. The affiliate space was like, this business model is amazing. We’re good at this. We love this. We love content. We think we can do better content than everybody else in the categories we are in. We believe in all that stuff. And now that whole business models just decimated. Now, there are sites out there that still have that. They do exist, and I know of a few that do quite well still. But you have to play that game absolutely perfectly. And if you make one mistake, boom, you’re going instantly to zero. There’s no margin of error. And hey, if we do decently well, we’ll still do okay, and we’ll have jobs. Not necessarily. I had a site I was building up last summer, in the September, 2024 update. It literally lost 90 % of traffic within 24 hours. And it was an SEO-focused site in the HR space. And I was investing content. I was doing it myself. I was writing all this content myself. And I was doing all these updates and going all in on search intent and real information and doing everything for the user.

 

[00:19:35.110] – Lars Lofgren

I wasn’t monetizing anything. I think I had two affiliate links in the entire site, 300 posts. And yeah, Google is like, no, we’re done. And I’m like, my content is better than anything else ranking right now. I fucking guarantee it. And it’s not one of those… I think I have the self-awareness to know when my content is worse or better. I’m not one of those people that’s like, my content is really good. And then you look at it and you’re I like this content shit. I know how to help a user. I’ve been doing this a while. I know copy, I know content, especially if I’m writing myself. I know how to do that, and I know I’m helping people. And then Google just decided it doesn’t like any of it. And then just completely nuked the whole site. So it depends on who’s doing it, right? Where’s your strategy in? Even if you’re an influencer or you have your brand or whatever, and you want to build up your media portfolio, I would beg you to go start somewhere else. Don’t start with SEO. And that pains me to say that because I love SEO.

 

[00:20:38.680] – Lars Lofgren

I love writing, I love the websites, I love all the analytics, I love all that stuff. That is all like the… And there’s still a ton of ROI in SEO. It’s crazy how much money is still flowing through Google. But that is now the reward for doing everything else right. You can’t go after it directly.

 

[00:20:59.550] – Jonathan Denwood

I think I think this is down… I think Google’s between a rock and a hard place here. I think it’s all around AI, and they’re a big player in AI, and they were using AI to index the internet, basically, in the background. The emphasis on back links had been totally corrupted. They knew it. They started to use AI as a indexing tool themselves. Then you had AI explode. Like they say, they’re between a rock and a hard place because all their income comes from search. They’re one of the main investors in AI or language models, but they also despise it. Just look at their attitude to AI-generated content. In my opinion, they think it’s just trash, just shit, basically. If they sense that your website’s using a lot of AI content, and they do a manual You’re not going to get anywhere with them. So that just shows you what… That’s typical Google, what they say in public or what they think in private are two totally different things. But then I follow Ran Fishkin, and you got all these people saying that everybody’s doing searches in utilizing AI, and Google’s finished. And a lot of people I’ve seen in the WordPress space, a lot of people have seen in the WordPress space, a lot of people have seen a reduction in traffic.

 

[00:23:07.360] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ve seen a reduction, but it was really down to me pushing the envelope a bit too far, but it’s gradually going back up again for me. But he’s pointed out that there’s been this propaganda that Google’s But when you look at the facts, the actual search volume has gone up. But it’s not pushing traffic to people’s websites because they’re using AI themselves to answer people’s queries. But how do you make any sense? Because I’m waffling, but it seems a very turbulent, and you got to be a bit careful about who you’re listening to and how you interpret. Because there seems to be a lot of uninformed propaganda out there.

 

[00:24:07.800] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. Well, for Google is full of shit, so I don’t listen to anything they say. That’s easy. You’re the only one. Yeah. Danny Sullivan, I respect a lot, but I also know, and I believe he believes everything he’s saying, and he’s trying to do the right thing. But inherently, Google is a really big company. I don’t know if you all know people that work in big tech companies. I know a bunch. I can’t name names. I can’t name which companies. I don’t know anybody at Google, but I know a number at other major tech companies. And the state of big tech right now is a shit show. It’s so bad. When there was an era, almost the golden era of tech and startups, when I was coming up, everybody that worked in tech, even big tech companies, they were here because they wanted to be here, right? And they knew what they were doing. Well, I mean, there’s always idiots, but there’s a lot of people that were here to do good work, the pirates, the romantics that believed in actually doing something and wanted to take companies, products, launches, campaigns, whatever they’re working on somewhere.

 

[00:25:16.190] – Lars Lofgren

Those days have changed. Tech became really fucking big, not just big, but fucking big. And now it’s the safe career for everybody. Everybody wants a job at all the big tech companies. So you get all the normal people that are here for a paycheck and don’t give a shit. And the internal state of most these companies is atrocious. It’s bullshit. It’s nonsense. It’s just people running around with no idea what they’re doing, wanting crazy stuff. And also There’s a lot of people that have been around long enough and gotten promoted high enough that they can’t get fired, even though they’re complete idiots. This is well known across tech, like very senior people that you see in headlines across tech companies. You’ll get the internal scoop on what that person is like, and they are a complete bullshitter. They have no idea what’s going on. It’s insane. And the entire product program is- They’ve gone to the right universities.

 

[00:26:13.580] – Jonathan Denwood

They’ve gone to the right universities.

 

[00:26:16.620] – Lars Lofgren

They also failed their way up. That is a thing. It happens. It happens in a minority of cases, but it takes one person to ruin an entire department, an entire program. Now, I don’t know how this apply or what degree this applies to the Google search team, but I can guarantee you it’s big enough. There’s probably all sorts of internal battles and a bunch of people that have no idea what the fuck is going on.

 

[00:26:41.330] – Jonathan Denwood

Can I ask you a quick question? Can you follow the logic of this love affair with Reddit?

 

[00:26:50.610] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, the money.

 

[00:26:52.380] – Jonathan Denwood

Because, Reddit doesn’t exist without Google’s. Is it really? I’ve got no evidence for this, and this is It’s just my personal opinion. It had all the sense… I shouldn’t say this because still could get into trouble. Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t say it. Basically, it did pass the sniff test to me, their love affair with Reddit. Would you agree that without Google’s assistant, Reddit wouldn’t… It wouldn’t have been able to gone It wouldn’t have been… They only had to turn the doll down a little bit, and Reddit got a cold, didn’t it? Or was it just panic? Is it linked to what you were pointing out? Was it they just got into a panic state when AI appeared in the public consciousness? Was it just Just share priming.

 

[00:28:01.140] – Lars Lofgren

Well, I think there’s a lot of things all converging together. So you have AI, which shook the whole thing up, and Google’s flailing around. It’s the terrified elephant in the living room, which is breaking everything. You also So if anybody remembers that era, 2021, 2022, there was a big narrative that was making its way through the SEO world of like, Google’s dead. If you want anything valuable, just go to Reddit. And I bet that narrative got into Google in a really big way internally, and everyone was like, we got to feature Reddit. Now, also, if you remember at that time, Reddit was actually featured pretty heavily in search results. Before we see that hockey stick of growth on all the Reddit search visibility curves, which is just like nothing. Nothing like that has ever happened in search to that extreme. But even before then, Reddit got a ton of traffic. It’s not like Reddit was never featured. Reddit was always there on the home when it made sense, but it also wasn’t there when it didn’t make sense. And I think before that time, Google actually put in work to figure out which Reddit threads are valuable, which ones are scammy.

 

[00:29:12.610] – Lars Lofgren

It wasn’t this default rank for whatever you want, even if it’s just a bunch of affiliate spam. I’ve seen actually legit financial fraud shit and just complete scams, not even affiliate, I’m going to promote a product that’s shitty and make money on the back end, but I’m going to promote fake stuff and just steal people’s money. That stuff makes it onto the first page of Google now. If you know what you’re doing, you can get wherever you want, which is insane.

 

[00:29:41.940] – Jonathan Denwood

In your latest interview, you You said that there’s whole landscapes or methodologies about how to utilize Reddit. But with this March update, I think, would you still think it’s still great days for Reddit, or do you think Google’s attitude to it’s calming down a bit?

 

[00:30:05.990] – Lars Lofgren

Well, it was Reddit. Reddit got a small visibility ding, right? Like during the holidays or sometime in Q4, I forget the exact date, but it was coming down a little bit and everyone’s like, oh, is Google actually starting to fix this? Is it actually on top of it? And then this year, it’s just been right back up. Now it’s hitting new records, right? And I think he’s the one that figured out that Reddit took a ton of their content and is translating it through AI, and Google is just eating it up. It’s featuring it everywhere, which you really shouldn’t do that. Any other site doing that is going to get hammered, absolutely destroyed for that mass content production. Reddit gets to do it, and Google is like, yeah, give us everything you got. So Reddit, and I’ve seen this on some other sites, It’s like once there are certain domains, you can get into this almost VIP status with Google where you can do no wrong and everything- Well, there’s a particular player in the WordPress space, who’s notorious, they’ve built a gray network of interlaced websites, and it’s a notorious SEO gray hatter, and most of the content’s absolute shit.

 

[00:31:32.300] – Jonathan Denwood

I mean, it’s terrible effing content. But him and his network, he’s untouched. It’s like he’s in with the in-crow with Google, even though his content’s always been shit, it’s untouched by Google.

 

[00:31:55.930] – Lars Lofgren

I would really like to know who it is. You don’t have to tell me on this call.

 

[00:31:59.130] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, he’s He threatened to sue me if I mention his name.

 

[00:32:02.350] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, that’s fine. Tell me in a private email. I’d like to keep an eye on it.

 

[00:32:07.490] – Jonathan Denwood

I think it’s time to go for our break. It’s been a fascinating discussion so far. We got a second half that should be of equal standing. We got a true expert about online content strategy here. I mean, a true expert. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

 

[00:32:29.220] – Lars Lofgren

I do have a hard We’ll stop right at the top of the hour, by the way.

 

[00:32:32.710] – Jonathan Denwood

Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a fantastic discussion so far. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress hosting provider for your large projects that provides all the technology in one package and does some really great special deals with freelancers like yourself, Why don’t you go over to WP tonic, WP-tonic. Com/partners. Wp-tonic. Com/partners. We love to build something special with you. Over to you, Kerr.

 

[00:33:17.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

All right. I want to take you back to an answer that you gave us 15 minutes ago. You mentioned a phrase, Bottom of the Funnel SEO. You started to explain it some, but I bet you there’s people listening to this that don’t even know what that means, let alone its advantages or disadvantages in relation to a normal, traditional SEO focus.

 

[00:33:43.760] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, happy to. So this is a very well-known space in the affiliate industry. And these are all the really valuable keywords, because this is where basically, if you think about bottom of the funnel, it’s where people, they know they have a problem, They know they want a solution, and they’re just trying to figure out which product to buy. Like best mountain bike. Someone is aware that mountain bikes can be fun. They want a mountain bike, and now they just want to pick which one they want, right? And so if you happen to feature, the best X is the big term that everybody is aware of, and everybody tries to go after it, and that’s where the real money is. But if you happen to rank really high for best mountain bikes, you’re going to make a ton money, so much money. And this is true across so many verticals. Now, you can’t just go after… If you’re a brand new mountain bike company, you’re not going to rank for best mountain bikes. You got to go after smaller stuff. But for a typical startup, there’s usually a niche that’s really narrow that you’re starting with because it’s the only way to get a footing in the door before you go big.

 

[00:34:53.790] – Lars Lofgren

So whatever your really, really small niche is, is there a category name for that niche that’s not that competitive? Is the keyword difficulty really low? Who else is actually going after it? Is it a bunch of other small sites? That’s a good sign. But it’s not even just the best X. That might be your main one that you’d like to go after. But there’s generally a a lot of smaller stuff, even more obscure stuff. And because it usually fragments so fast that it’s difficult, even in some competitive niches, to get complete coverage on all of it, even if you’re going after that category as a player. So for a startup, there’s usually a way in somewhere. So if you’re continuing the mountain bike example, you might… Who’s even within your sub-nich of on bikes, who’s your primary competitor? Who is that one where you’re really going toe to toe with? It’s probably not one of the major… I don’t know anything about mountain bikes, so I’m pulling all this out of my ass. But there’s probably within your subnich one player that you’re going up against. Well, you should write a blog post on that competitor review.

 

[00:36:07.350] – Lars Lofgren

People are going to go look. They want to know, is that competitor legit? They’re going to look for reviews. Why don’t you write a review on your primary competitor, put a blog post going after that review topic. You could also do alternatives with your brand versus your primary competitor. You can… And there’s probably… Well, there’s usually one primary competitor and then a few more that are somewhat adjacent, do that across your whole little subnich. If you’ve picked a good niche to start with that’s properly narrow, even for a brand new site with a very minimal brand, you can probably get some traction just by mapping out all those individual topics. You have versus topics, you have alternatives topics, you have name review topics, you have usually your category, your best X. There might be some subcategories that you can go after. Now you’re talking 20, 30 blog posts pretty fast. And even some basic, non-complicated blog post And it would still do well going after those terms. Now, if you’re trying to like, I’m going to be going after best web hosting, and I’m going to launch a new web host product from the ground up, and I’m going to go head to head with Bluehost Host and Hostinger and GoDaddy.

 

[00:37:31.580] – Lars Lofgren

I’m like, this isn’t going to work. You’re not going to be able to write GoDaddy review. That’s going to be tough. Or like GoDaddy versus Bluehost. I’ve gone after all these terms. This is like big league type stuff. So you got to, hopefully you’re in an industry that doesn’t know about SEO that much, that helps. Hopefully you’ve picked a niche that’s narrow enough to give you a foot in. But that stuff can be worth the time because even if it doesn’t matter, I’ll say there’s a few things that still make that valuable. One is even with all the AIO and LLM bullshit, when someone’s truly looking at a product decision, especially a somewhat expensive product decision, they are going to do their homework, or at least a lot of people are. They’re going to start with ChatGPT, and then they’re going to dig in, and they’re going to look for more reviews, and they’re going to look for alternatives, and they’re going to want to read more blog posts. That’s all an opportunity to get in front of users through that research journey. So So the AIOs are not going to lock you out necessarily.

 

[00:38:34.380] – Lars Lofgren

They’re still VLU in it. The other thing is, even if traffic is collapsing across the Internet, at least Google, you only need a couple of visitors on any of these posts for it to be valuable. If a post delivers you a handful of customers a year, it’s paid for itself. If it delivers you 12 customers a year, you’re in the green by a lot. Now, multiply that by 20, 30. Hell, yeah. That is a consistent small, but a consistent flow of customers. And then as your brand gets bigger, you can decide, okay, are we going to go after the mid-tier stuff? Are we going to try to level up in Google and go after some bigger people. And then maybe you get really big and you can go after the primary product category in your space. But that’s stuff to approach as you keep growing.

 

[00:39:27.550] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. And just to I don’t want to take too much time on this topic, but we have discussed on the show the idea of having a niche, like extensively. I think people really get lost on the whole, because they think they’re taking away their sales opportunities. Instead of focusing on what’s there. You mentioned mountain biking, which is my passion, coincidentally. We could say aluminum frame, carbon fiber frame, dual suspension, front suspension. All great. 27-inch tires, 29-inch tires, the width of the handlebars, cross country or downhill. And so there’s all those subcategories. At what point does someone run the risk of nicheing down too far? Is that even a possibility?

 

[00:40:13.880] – Lars Lofgren

If there’s search traffic, I would say like any search traffic around your niche or like your one to one competitor, you haven’t niche down too much. Perfect. And honestly, you could also say, now it takes a lot of judgment and a lot of luck, too. But the real play from a marketing strategy point of view is to create a new niche. If I’m creating a mountain bike company, how can I do something that the mountain bike community has not heard before? How can I create… Basically, WP Engine did this with WordPress. Before, it was just web hosting. Everybody had cPanel, and you installed WordPress, and that was it. And WP Engine came along and goes, No, we’re going to do WordPress hosting. Completely, they basically… And now they own that subnich, right?

 

[00:41:06.580] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m completing in the hosting niche, but we are a boutique. I use the word we are a boutique hosting provider in a particular sector. I use this strategy. I use bottom of the funnel with a bit of Brian Dean thrown in, a little bit of skyscraper thrown in as well into the concoction. I just try and give Google a load of signals by using video and podcasting. I try and give Google that I’m a legit player in the space. I produce a ton of video, I put video on all my written content, and I do a ton of podcasting to build links and credibility. I think, hopefully, that gives some of the signals to Google that I’m a legit player in the niche that I’m playing at, and I mix it all up and try and give… Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work. I can’t predict which post gets some traction. I’m always surprised which ones do, which ones… I choose some that I think are going to do really well with Google, and they don’t. It’s quite interesting, really, isn’t it?

 

[00:42:25.420] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. You have to do everything these days.

 

[00:42:27.970] – Jonathan Denwood

What do you reckon of what I’ve just outlined? Do you think that’s a reasonable strategy, trying to give the right signals to Google?

 

[00:42:34.540] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. For anybody, I wouldn’t try to do a pure SEO play at all anymore, even if you’re a startup or you got your own company and you’re trying to do some of this bottom of the funnel stuff. Don’t treat it as an ongoing program. Just treat it as a project and then with a little ongoing maintenance, at least to start, and then go spend a lot of time in some other channel. That’s right. This is another thing that pains me to say this, and in a way this detracts from Google. This makes Google worse. I’m trying to convince people to not invest in content for Google because the ROI is so tricky, unless you’re a huge company. But Go spend time on… I mean, you don’t have that many options these days, right?

 

[00:43:19.430] – Jonathan Denwood

You have a podcast. Well, that’s the pop loop, isn’t it?

 

[00:43:21.250] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. It gets real short after that, right? So pick whichever one resonates with you. It needs to be some top of the funnel, social-ish channel. Youtube splits the divide a little bit. And make sure that you have a really serious content program going on on at least one other channel. And invest in that, probably for a long time, and put more effort in that than SEO. Really pick your battles with SEO instead of going all in, like I used to do, and it used to work really well. Again, unless if If you’re Mr. Beast or if you’re on MrBeast’s team, and he’s like, Okay, we’re going to move into SEO, I’d be like, Yeah.

 

[00:44:05.560] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m MrBeast of WordPress.

 

[00:44:08.940] – Lars Lofgren

None of us are MrBeast. But like you’ll say, if you’ve won the game in your other channel and you want to go do SEO, I’ll be like, Okay, this is going to be just fine. But if you’re just starting, go build you too.

 

[00:44:21.790] – Jonathan Denwood

Go build like that. That’s me all over, like I’m MrBeast of WordPress. I think we’re going to drop the next We’re going over the last question because you’re a busy guy and you got a hard stop. If you had a time machine like HD Wells, and you could go back to the beginning of your career and just have a quick 5, 10 minute little chat with yourself. Is there any little insight you would have told yourself that you wish you knew then that you know now?

 

[00:44:55.350] – Lars Lofgren

The only thing you can’t do is say, not come on this show. Yeah, in 15 years. No, I’d say two things. One personal, one career-related. The personal one, I would say, in my 20s, I was extremely frugal, way too frugal. I was living with my girlfriend and my partners. We’re still together. And I think we moved into our own place. And I think it took us two years to get a couch, and we didn’t even get a full size couch. We just got a tiny little love seat because I was worried about the price. For the first year and a half, the living room was just my desk, and I was just working all the time. That’s all I was doing. And I’d be like, Lars, you can spend a little bit of money. It’s okay. You can go buy a couch, okay? You can go to Italy or something. I don’t know, man. It’s going to be fine. Don’t be so paranoid about the financial side. That’s a me thing. But as far as the professional on the real side, I’d be like, Lars, you really like SEO. You really like blogs. There’s a lot of money in this space, and I know you’re doing a career thing working in other companies.

 

[00:46:11.130] – Lars Lofgren

But honestly, this window has a timeline on it. It’s going to get different, and that window is going to shut. If you want to go build something, build it fucking now. Don’t go work at that next job. Fucking go for it. And that probably worked out very, very well for me. I mean, it still worked I have nothing to complain about. And I would say the same thing to move it forward to someone that might be earlier in their career. If you are super passionate about YouTube is still hot, podcasts are still hot, TikTok, if you know those games and you just feel it in your bones, go fucking do it. Do it now because the platforms are going to change. Platforms are going to come and go. There was an era where you could have You can build all sorts of crazy shit on Twitter. That’s fucking gone. Who had that in their fortune cookie? That’s insane. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to YouTube, but it’s probably not going to be good. At some point, it’s going to go sideways. How? I don’t know, but it will. And same thing with all these other platforms.

 

[00:47:23.570] – Lars Lofgren

So if you’re a little early with the big wave that’s coming and you just get that media environment, go build the fucking thing and take advantage of it now, because I always assumed I’d have more time. I was like, okay, I’m going to go work on this other thing I’m really interested in, and then I’ll get around to this. And then by the time I finally truly got around to it, door shut. We got about five minutes before we wrap it up.

 

[00:47:50.370] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m really big on YouTube, and I must have, over this year, uploaded over 600 videos to YouTube, and it’s really paid some dividends, and my YouTube channel’s grown quite rapidly, but it’s been a lot of hard work. But I’m still very, and We got the master of LinkedIn as my co-host. He’s actually written a course about LinkedIn and using it for your business to business. He’s actually written a course on it. I do post a lot It’s not content to LinkedIn, but it’s aimed more at the bigger clientele, and hopefully it will pay off. But I’m really big on YouTube, and I’ve invested a lot of time. What’s your own thoughts about YouTube?

 

[00:48:46.100] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, I think YouTube is still hot. I think it’s still the ROI is definitely there. New stuff is popping off all the time. You could create something from nothing. I’m definitely not an expert by any means, but at a high level, the platform feels healthy to me from what I see and just interacting with it as a user. It feels vibrant, it feels active, and the rewards are there. Like, yes, everyone hates the recommendation algorithm. Creators, users, there’s always things to bitch about. People always bitch about Google, always. That’s always there. But from a bird’s-eye view, it does feel like it’s healthy as a whole. It’s never perfect, but fundamentally, it works. You put You put in the time, you put in the effort, you try really hard, you iterate, you have the self-awareness to keep tweaking until you get that polish right. Some people don’t have that, and it’ll never work for them, and that sucks. But if you work through it and get through that learning curve, Pay off’s there, at least it seems to me.

 

[00:49:48.560] – Jonathan Denwood

What’s your thoughts about email marketing?

 

[00:49:51.570] – Lars Lofgren

Oh, email’s great. I love email. So email has changed a little bit simply because people don’t reply to emails like they used to. I could get crazy inbox conversations going from email 10, 15 years ago. Now people just don’t reply. Even if you have a super engaging email list, people just… So it’s become a more passive channel, but it’s still great. People read that shit. The main thing, I’m hesitant. I’m very cautious about this one, although it’s working for a lot of people right now. If you get into kit or Beehive or Substack or any of these things. There’s also that recommended algorithm on sign up where everybody’s seeding each other’s email list. Remember, it reminds me of the catalog co-ops. I don’t know if everybody’s familiar with that history, but basically the catalog industry came together. Everybody in the home furnishing industry would come together and dump all of their buyers into a single database and then just rent the buyers from each other. Someone can probably go into more detail on how this works, but that works great for a while. And then it just destroyed the entire industry because the teams got lazy.

[00:51:03.890] – Lars Lofgren

All the same buyers got recirculated over and over and over again. And catalogs are suffering for many other reasons, but this didn’t help at all.

[00:51:13.950] – Jonathan Denwood

So Thanks for that. Lastly, what are your thoughts? I’m pushing it because you have to be off in a couple of minutes, but what are your thoughts about LinkedIn? Because I got the master here, Kirk. To me, that seems a strange platform. That’s a real… It’s just…

[00:51:35.100] – Lars Lofgren

I see it. It is odd. Well, there are odd things about it, but it’s another platform. We could complain about details and this and that, but again, from a high level. LinkedIn seems healthy to me. If I put much effort into LinkedIn, good things come out. And yes, everyone’s doing the, woe is me, my worst boss’ blah, blah, blah. Here’s my morning routine. Say this stupid catchphrase in the comments, and I’ll give you this PDF I had AI write. It’s like all this junk. But if you put in the effort, it’s another thing you can get from LinkedIn. And yeah, you got to deal with the algorithm. Yeah, you’ve got to build it over time. Yes, you have to iterate. Yes, you have to get through the learning curve. Yes, you have to be able to say something interesting, which many people cannot do. And that sucks. But fundamentally, I do think the platform works. I went hard on LinkedIn last fall and was like, this is great. It’s top-of-funnel stuff, but you can get somewhere with it.

[00:52:42.340] – Lars Lofgren

If I were building a B2B SaaS startup, I’d be on LinkedIn about twice a day, every day. I’d be going so hard on it, and I’d be like, this is my top-of-funnel content channel. Sooner or later, LinkedIn will probably do something stupid that breaks the core, not just make it annoying but break the thing. Google, not only did they make it annoying over several years, but they also fundamentally broke it. I don’t think they understand why or how they broke it.

[00:53:09.440] – Jonathan Denwood

You got to be off in a couple of minutes. So what’s the best way to learn more about your knowledge? Because you’ve shared, you’ve been a great guest, and hopefully later in the year, you agreed to come back on the show because I love it. You’ve been a great guest. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and what you know? Because you’ve been very generous with your knowledge.

[00:53:34.430] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, the first sense we’re talking about it. Contact me on LinkedIn, mention the show, and I’ll automatically respond or accept the connection. And then, if you want to go, we’ll go deeper than that. Larslaffgren. Com. That’s my blog. I blog occasionally, but when I do blog, I try hard. And then there’s an email list there if you want to ensure you don’t miss out on any updates. So could you email us at larslaffgren? Com or hit me up on LinkedIn.

[00:54:02.110] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:54:08.030] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, they’re already on LinkedIn looking up Lars Laufgren. Look up Kurt von Annen. I’m the only Kurt von Annen on LinkedIn. If you found me, you found me. And we’ll make the connection and go from there.

[00:54:18.120] – Jonathan Denwood

I want to point out that I post a ton of stuff on LinkedIn. I’ve been doing it for over a year. I don’t know how many videos and other things I have on LinkedIn, but it must be substantial. But if you want to support the show, share it with your friends and colleagues—the show’s growing. I think the influence of the show is also growing. We get some fantastic guests. We’ve just shown it. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group

Why don’t you sign up and be part of the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get all the best advice and support connected to building your membership or community website on WordPress?

Facebook Group